It takes more than reality to destroy national myths

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Americans and Australians each have a dream Lucky Country, writes
Michael Gawenda.

There is no need to feel bad about this, but Americans love
Australia though they know next to nothing about the place.

Their love is based essentially on three things: our
faithfulness as an ally, on what they see as shared values between
the two countries, and on a feeling that Australia is the lost and
lamented America of a century ago.

Even Americans who have visited Australia and just love the time
they spent there know virtually nothing about the place, which just
goes to show that travel confirms rather than shatters
stereotypes.

When the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, was in Washington
recently, he delivered the annual Anzac lecture at one of the think
tanks. The audience was made up mainly of conservative think-tank
types, Bush Administration officials and several American
journalists who had come, it seemed, for a free lunch.

They all loved Downer's speech, and why wouldn't they? As one
Bush Administration official said afterwards, he could think of no
other foreign minister who would make a speech like Downer's
speech, which was essentially a love letter to the United
States.

And what was that love based on? Why, shared values, of course,
and our faithfulness as an ally. Australians, Downer said, stuck by
their mates and did the right thing, no matter how hard the going.
And they did so quietly, without fanfare, because that's what
Aussies are like.

Clouds of nostalgia filled the room as the Americans recalled
the time, in their age of innocence, when John Wayne and Gary
Cooper vanquished the bad guys and then quietly rode off into the
sunset.

It is possible that even an Australian breast or two swelled a
little with pride as Downer explained how we had "punched above our
weight" in all the wars in which we had been involved.

The thing is, though, that a love based on what amounts to
bulldust is infatuation and we all know how quickly infatuation can
be followed by disappointment and resentment.

Take shared values. When Americans talk shared values they mean
Australians are like Americans only nicer, more innocent. Not true.
We may share a commitment to liberal democracy, but there are many
fundamental values that we do not share.

The majority of Americans are regular churchgoers and, according
to polls, more than 80 per cent of Americans are believers. The
majority of Americans believe in creationism rather than evolution.
And many Americans believe that God loves America best of all.

No great shared values there. Indeed, the first European
Australians thought that, if God existed, he had abandoned them in
this faraway place where they had been brought, shackled and
chained, against their will.

And the great American dream is not an egalitarian one: it is
that every American, no matter how humble his or her origins, can
aspire to be president, and if not president, then at least wealthy
and successful.

Americans in the main do not resent or excoriate the wealthy:
they hope that one day they, or at least their children, will join
the ranks of the rich. There is no tall-poppy syndrome in America.
Americans love rags-to-riches stories. They love success.

They don't even seem to mind that the super wealthy, the top 0.1
per cent of the population, people who earn more than $US10 million
($13 million) a year, are the big winners from the Bush
Administration tax cuts.

It doesn't seem to matter that the gap between rich and poor in
the United States is growing and becoming entrenched, that the
chances of those born poor becoming even moderately wealthy are
slim, that the American dream more and more is a fantasy.

The dream lives in the culture and in the American psyche and in
the hearts of the millions of illegal migrants who have crossed the
border from Mexico into the United States - the golden land as the
Jewish immigrants of the early 20th century called it - with
nothing but the clothes they are wearing.

This is no different than Australian egalitarianism, which the
Prime Minister, John Howard, says is a defining feature of
Australia's national character, even as Australia grows ever more
unequal. Clearly it takes more than reality to destroy national
myths and dreams.

Where does that leave the great American love of Australia? One
thing is true: on any reckoning, we have been good and faithful
allies, even if most Americans would be surprised to learn that for
a significant number of Australians that is no cause for
celebration.